During America’s short and costly participation in the First World War, a prominent New York clothing establishment, Brooks Brothers, did swift business making custom uniforms for both the Army and Navy.
As the following attachment will show, they also offered forty other items that were of use to both the officers as well as the ranks.
Click here to see a Vanity Fair editorial about Christmas gifts for Doughboys.
These three pages were from the last of the two wartime Christmas issues American Vogue had managed to produce prior to the Armistice. Featured are some fashionable accessory items sold on New York’s Fifth Avenue that the Vogue editors deemed suitable for industrial warfare.
Click here to read about the Sam Brown Belt.
Written a few months after the war began, this German short story was written about a particular front line rifle company and the contempt that they shared for one of their officers. Its a good read.
This article originally appeared in a French magazine and it lists numerous cultures, both ancient and modern, that eat dogs regularly:
We do not know the edible dog or the edible cat, in France, and probably since the siege they have been little served (openly at least) on the tables of Paris restaurants. At Peking, and throughout China, there is no dainty repast without its filet or leg of dog; the cat is rather a dish of the poorer classes.
At long last the impact of of total war had bruised the American consciousness. Despite the initial success of General MacArthur’s victory on Luzon and the Russians on the Eastern front, the first three weeks of 1945 had brought the nation face to face with the realities ahead as at no time since Pearl Harbor. No single factor could this metamorphosis be attributed, but it was plain that the stark lists of causalities and the growing hardships at home had contributed to it.
In 1921 a Kyoto Bible school was challenged by a neighboring Buddhist temple. The confrontation did not involve the finer points of theology (not openly, anyway) but which of the two tribes was superior at baseball. It was a Hell of a game.
The uncredited foreign correspondent made it known within the opening paragraphs that the Kyoto Buddhists were irked by the spread of Christianity in that region of Japan and chose to deploy any means at their disposal to gain some sort of advantage.
Twenty-one years later a Japanese team would play an American team. Read about that game here…
As a phenomenon in the history of the show business and among all children, Shirley Temple (1928 – 2014) stands as absolutely unique. For four successive years she has led all other stars in the film industry as the number one box office attraction of the world. But Shirley’s influence has been wider than this – there is no country in the world, both civilized and uncivilized where at some time or another her pictures have not been shown.
In a few weeks Shirley’s fan mail reached avalanche proportions, with with the result in her next film, Bright Eyes
Confronting the issue of growing unrest in British Palestine, Winston Churchill cautioned the British colonial administrators to soothe the tempers of the Arabs in Palestine by limiting the growth of the Jewish population.
Novelist Taylor Caldwell (Born Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell: 1900 – 1985) recalled the bleak days of the Great Depression – and the perpetual appearance of American socialist who seemed always to be in recruitment mode.
Open or crypto-Communists, they had one unwavering theme: Communism was a System with a Heart. Communism was the new Christianity. Communism was the savior of the working people. America must become Communistic, if it was to pull out of the Great Depression. The Light of the World was not in my church. It was in Moscow.
Click here to read further about American Communists during the Great Depression…
In 1887 the NEW YORK TIMES reviewed the first english edition of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, click here to read it…
A brief notice from 1917 reported on the arrest of three women for smoking in the Times Square subway station in New York City.
When the socially astute, forward-thinking judge recognized that no real crime had been committed they were released, but in the high fashion world feminine tobacco abuse, these women are often said to be the Rosa Parks of nicotine:
Mary Driscoll, Edna Stanley and Elsie Peterson
let their names live ever more!
A brief notice from 1917 reported on the arrest of three women for smoking in the Times Square subway station in New York City.
When the socially astute, forward-thinking judge recognized that no real crime had been committed they were released, but in the high fashion world feminine tobacco abuse, these women are often said to be the Rosa Parks of nicotine:
Mary Driscoll, Edna Stanley and Elsie Peterson
let their names live ever more!
American columnist Walter Lippmann of the The New York Herald Tribune wrote:
They symbolize the moral and intellectual character of the Nazi regime. For these bonfires are not the work of schoolboys or mobs but of the present German Government acting through its Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment.
CLICK HERE to read an article from 1923 about the abitious Adolf Hitler.
This is an interesting article that assesses the financial abilities of each of the 48 states in 1935 in an effort to illustrate that the ten richest states, as a result of their minority status on Capitol Hill, were in no position to cry out about majority tyranny when the insolvent 38 states rigged a deliberately unfair tax code that would see to it that they alone would pay the nation’s bills.
The ‘rich’ people may howl and growl and moan at having to foot the bills for everything, but there’s no remedy for it… The reason is this: our parade of poor states totals 38, while the rich states number only ten. The figures show that these rich states, which have only one-third the population, have to pay two-thirds of the taxes. The 10 richest states have only 20 Senators in the Senate, while the 38 poor states have 76. The rich are decidedly in the minority and there is no way for them to change the set-up.
Here is an article about the legendary Marilyn Monroe (né Norma Jeane Mortenson: 1926 – 1962), her painful beginnings, the cheesecake pictures, the bit-parts and her enormous popularity as a star are all woven into a narrative that never lets the reader forget that her unique type of appeal was something entirely new.
When this interview appeared on the newsstands, Jean Harlow (1911 – 1937) had fifteen credits under her belt (most of them short films) and only six years left until she would assume room temperature as a result of kidney failure. Written by the PHOTOPLAY reporter Leonard Hall (who would like us to believe that he was a Hollywood studio psychiatrist), this is a light and breezy two page interview conducted at the New Yorker Hotel at a time when that establishment appealed to Hollywood Royalty.
Click here to read articles about Marilyn Monroe.
A short account regarding Hugh Harman (1903 – 1982) and Rudy Ising (1903 – 1992) who were a team of Oscar winning animators best known for founding the animation studios at Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
In the last decade the animated cartoon has developed from its early grotesque form to its present lofty state and this development is really a miracle in art and achievement in entertainment… The significance of the animated cartoon can be realized only when we consider its world wide appeal and power of influence.
The same year this article went to press, Harmon-Ising produced their much admired anti-war cartoon, Peace on Earth.
Here is one of the few histories that explain the Star-Spangled Banner that seldom mentions its author. This short column will tell you about Sam Smith, the Militia general who kept the flag at Fort McHenry waving throughout that perilous fight.
This article was written by an anonymous soul who wanted the Script readers to understand that the life of an American Communist during the Great Depression was not a good one. Their lives often involved constant police surveillance and harassment to say nothing of blacklisting.
What boon can membership in the Communist Party confer upon them in exchange for the martyrdom they almost inevitably suffer? But is any membership card ever printed worth having one’s skull fractured for?
More about American Communists during the Great depression can be read here
